


The Great Escape

by BrooklynBugleBoy



Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Amputation, Bad Parenting, Birth Defects, Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Cooking Lessons, Dark, Death, Drugs, F/M, Heroin, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Mentions of Cancer, Protective Siblings, Sad, Trans Character, Trans child, death of a child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 12:08:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17766509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrooklynBugleBoy/pseuds/BrooklynBugleBoy
Summary: "Where are you going, Houdini?" He'd screamed at her once.But when he took that first fateful step towards her, looking more and more like their version of the Boogeyman, she'd closed her eyes and waited for the punch that never came. Roger was crying instead. Looking for all the world like a scared child, the one he'd always been."I'm going to become him." Their abusive prick of a Dad.He wept. "And you'll become her." Their empty husk of a Mum.Roger left that year.Left her alone, in the Hell they had always called Home.An Escapologist: an entertainer specializing in escaping from the confinement of such things as ropes, handcuffs, and chains.





	The Great Escape

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little thing for @UniversesVisiting YES I C A N WRITE FEMALES!!!! <3333
> 
>  
> 
> Features: Whiskey Lullaby by Brad Paisley 
> 
> And the overdose song is from a PSA called Lessons From My Neighborhood, linked below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hnam_BBG4k
> 
> Important Notes:  
> These characters share the names of real people, but are not the real people. Not even close, this never happened. But many children do grow up in these types of situations! And there are many foundations you can work with to help! 
> 
> Also the cancer mentioned in this is called DIPG: it is a brain cancer that develops in the pons of small children and is so nefarious that the survival rate is 0%. Zero. No child lives. I've linked the foundation down below, so please feel free to research. Awareness makes all the difference: https://www.thebraintumourcharity.org/understanding-brain-tumours/types-brain-tumour-children/dipg-diffuse-intrinsic-pontine-glioma/

“ _She put him out like the burnin' end of a midnight cigarette_  
_She broke his heart, he spent his whole life tryin' to forget_  
_We watched him drink his pain away a little at a time_  
_But he never could get drunk enough to get her off his mind_  
_Until the night…”_

 

 

  
Pudge used to _hate_ her hair.

The medical term for its natural discoloration was _Poliosis_ , a pretty name for the chunk of white on her hairline the size of a fist, sitting above her right eye.

The actual reference people understood was _Sweeney Todd_ hair.

Only she wasn't some demonic barber from Fleet Street, just a weird kid with unusual hair.

And as if to add insult to injury, her big brother just so happened to be born with the prettiest fucking hair on planet earth.

Roger Taylor's hair just naturally grew in perfectly bouncy defined waves, the most flawless shade of sunshine-blonde. It was no wonder really, that Pudge had been forced to stifle the urge to rip it out in clumps since they were children _(come to think of it, she probably had ripped out quite a bit)_. Her own hair wouldn't curl even if she took an fancy iron to it, and straightening it was like anathema.

She was cursed with fluffy funky hair that stuck out from all ends, not curled and not straight, looking like she'd just stuck her finger in an electrical socket. Frankenstein's bride brought to life at last. 

 

Then, she would think about the day she met her best-friend Hadley.

Specky, chubby and ten kinds of shy, who had reached over to tap her on her shoulder during snack-time and say: "You're a  _Melanchroia chephise."_

Understandably, the seven-year-old Pudge had just blinked over at the new kid in confusion, utterly stupefied, as she wasn't sure if she was being insulted or not. Her parents were usually a lot more up front with their barbs. _Pointless little bitch, worthless little gimp, ungrateful tramp..._

The sandy-haired boy had simply dug the toes of his sandals into the old moth-eaten carpet, pointedly not looking over at the classmate he'd maybe-insulted. "It's a white-tipped black moth, also called the _snowbush spanworm."_

"Oh." Green eyes wide. "'Cause of my hair?" 

A blush spread across those round glasses-clad cheeks as the boy nodded. "Moths, butterflies and skippers all have really neat color schemes, usually to attract mates or camouflage from predators." Then he viciously bit down on his bottom lip, almost ashamed. As if the knowledge and any ensuing excitement about it was a crime. Pudge had only been a little kid then, but she'd been bright enough to realize just how much she would hate that look on Hadley's face for the rest of her life.

  
" _Mates_..." She puzzled over the word for a moment before brightening up and grabbing at Hadley’s vaguely sticky hand excitedly. 

"That's like _boyfriends and girlfriends_ right?"  

The specky boy looked just seconds away from hyperventilating where he sat, those brown doe eyes wide, but had nodded. It was pretty understandable, as both the Taylor kids were a bit too much to handle, even back then. Pudge's free hand carded through that awful fuzzy hair on her head and yet her smile grew even bigger, as if threatening to swallow up her whole face. 

"My hair attracted you, right? So does that mean we're boyfriend and girlfriend now?" 

Yup. Little Hadley had definitely stopped breathing around that point. 

Not waiting for an answer, she had snatched up the hand of her new best-friend and dragged him over to the sandpit.

Hadley didn’t ask about the bruises on her collar and wrists, or the funny way she walked on her matching below-the-knee prosthetics _(born without tibias as well as the white patch on her head)._

She didn’t ask about the fact that Hadley had a pink backpack with butterflies on it or was so often forced into wearing clothes he hated. He was her _boyfriend,_ plain and simple.

It didn’t matter if Teacher called him a _girl._  Because Hadley was a _boy_ and he would be her best-friend forever and ever.

And suddenly, she didn’t really hate her hair anymore.

  
-X-

  
“ _He put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger_  
_And finally drank away her memory_  
_Life is short, but this time it was bigger_  
_Than the strength he had to get up off his knees.”_

  
_-_ X-

  
Pudge was the second of the Taylor children.

The first was her older brother Roger, who was all grown up and in his twenties, age and ingenuity had rescued him out of the veritable Hell they had always called Home.

Pudge who was fourteen, but often times felt like she was a hundred, had learned how to play her role in life rather quickly. 

Roger was loud, he had screamed at the top of his lungs like a banshee from his first breath onward, it was almost instinctive for him to sound like a tsunami siren, prompting even their vacant-eyed mother to cup and cover her ears mid-contraction. _Fucking crybaby..._

So, in true contrary fashion, Pudge was born several years later with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. 

Her hazy green eyes were rolled upwards and glassy, her face practically violet. Some amazing womb-acrobatics had prompted her cord to wrap around her throat not just once, but three times. It was a wonder that she had survived the birthing process at all without an emergency C-section and that harrowing trip down the birth canal at all. So no, Pudge did not cry like her brother. She was quiet, still. Even when she could breathe.

Something that would come to set the tone for the rest of their lives together. 

Pudge put up with all of it.

Their father’s screaming, their mother’s track-marks and hollow eyes. _She grew up to know a lot about heroin, it came from poppy plants and it could be injected, smoked, or snorted, the most pure batches were reserved for snorting or smoking. Pure smack was more likely to kill you if you injected it. At first it made their Mum go all manic and rushed, then a mix of passed out and awake. Living in the Twilight Zone._

Roger never put up with anything. He fought and he screamed and he got in the way. So he often got hurt.

She hated it, but what could she do? She was too busy being invisible. _Maybe that was why he hated her so much_. Living in that house meant fending for yourself. When Roger got older he would scream and shout at their Dad in the same tone, with the same raised fists and whiskey stains on his shirt, she found herself being afraid of him in the same way _. "Where are you going, Houdini?" He'd screamed at her once. But when he took a step towards her, she'd closed her eyes and waited for the punch that never came. Roger was crying instead. Looking for all the world like a scared child. "I'm going to become him." He wept. "And you'll become her."_

_He left that year._

She was alone in the world.

Mostly because her parents had their own demons to lose to, and had taken one look at their second child and been disgusted by the sight.

It was more than the white splash in her hair.

She never got to _feel it_ you know. 

 _Walking, running, standing up,_ the chance to feel as if those things were _simple._

To not have to slip gel holsters onto her stumps, before sliding them into her prosthetics. _She'd learned how to do it herself very early on._

To not have to worry about rubbing them red or breaking the skin and getting an infection. _No one would take her to the hospital._

To not have to suffer through that second of _longing_ , that instant wish, that she could look just like everyone else, that she could be just like everyone else.

But then....she would think of the girl she was now and the medals she’d won at a couple track meets with her team. She would remember the middle-schooler she was, who would strap on her prosthetic legs, before going out and stopping any goal the other footie teams would shoot at her. She could see in her mind's eye, the first-grader who had drawn a picture of herself with just stumps instead of prosthetics and when her teacher asked, had blurted out that she didn't need legs to be whole.

And finally, a year old baby in a wrinkled hospital gown, strapped to an IV pole. Her legs, sitting floppy and malformed in front of her. The air thick with a promise.

A promise that double amputation would give her a chance at a normal life. _Correction: a full life, because normal was boring anyway._

She knew that her oddities had probably driven her father to drink even more than before and become more violent. That her mother’s drug dependance was worse after she was born. All the surgeries, all the prosthetics, although the ones she had now were far too small and burned when she used them. They blistered her scarred skin and smarted something fierce, but she didn’t dare complain. Not when she already needed long sleeves in summer to cover up all the bruises and cigarette burns.

She would never be one of those heroic icons, spreading hope from the other side.

She wasn't a war hero, cancer survivor or a shark attack victim.

She was just a girl, who was born with a disease that made amputation her best option. 

She started volunteering at hospitals when she was thirteen. It wasn't much at first. She just needed to get out of that sodding Hellhouse.

She didn't even start with amputees or rehab.

But eventually, that was where she ended up.

Surrounded by a group of new amputees, most still in shock, others embittered. Most scarred by a few callous nurses who would wrap their _residual limbs_  too tight, sometimes they said too much, other times too little. She didn’t smile. She didn’t give false sentiments or promises. She just pulled out a fresh deck of cards and asked if anyone wanted to play Go Fish. 

After a few weeks "Do you have any threes?" turned into "The pain wakes me up at night, it's like I'm reliving it all over again."

Pudge did all she could, she listened and she came up with crafty solutions.

One day, she handed the deck of cards to a twenty-eight year old man who'd just lost his arm to cancer.

She had turned to the rest of her motley crew to say only one statement: 

"Curtis is shuffling the deck today." 

The man had looked up at her with his hurt doe-eyes, but she had just reached over to guide his IV taped hand to the table, urging him to drop the deck. Once he did, she took his palm and rubbed it into the cards, moving them all around.

Then she helped him scoop the cards into a stack again.

He'd shuffled the deck.

And she told him so, with a proud edge to her voice.

For the first time, the young man returned her smile. And then he started to cry. Anyone who said that crying was dainty or delicate, inherently feminine, had clearly never seen someone truly cry before _(or understood the concept of femininity, but that was a talk for another day)._ It was loud and ugly and awful. But the tears just kept on coming, it was as if a dam had burst. He was choking and hiccuping and gasping.

And Pudge just watched, she let him cry. It was the only way his demons would ever release him. 

After three months of volunteering there, she came into a group meeting and slipped off her prosthetics. Most of her observers were shocked, showing off your stump(s) to strangers was already taboo, even for the newer amputees. But she just grinned. 

"This one is _Maverick_ ," tapping her right thigh, "And this one is _Goose_." She did the same to her left thigh. "And yes, they are named after _Top Gun_ characters. Oh, and if you ask me why... here's your answer: _why the bloody hell not?"_

That broke something then, and the room erupted in laughter. Some of them, Pudge had never met before, and they were laughing as if they'd known her a million years. She liked that. And she couldn't help but hope, that if they saw her ease with her stumps, with Maverick and Goose, maybe they'd touch their own red-streaked and thickened residual limbs.

Maybe they'd see that the thing they saw as foreign, different, and alien, was actually part of them.

Something utterly and totally theirs. 

  
-X-

  
“ _We found him with his face down in the pillow_  
_With a note that said, 'I'll love her till I die.'_  
_And when we buried him beneath the willow_  
_The angels sang a whiskey lullaby…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
_“Do you know how to tell if Mom is overdosing on drugs?_

_Don’t call the ambulance if you’re in doubt, unless she shakes uncontrollably and foams at the mouth, that’s an overdose. An overdose._

_You could find her on the floor or find her in bed, and if you know what to do she won’t end up dead… of an overdose. An overdose._

_The signs of danger are simple to see: if she twitching and seizing and can barely breathe, that’s an overdose. That’s an overdose._

_…Mom always knows best_.”

 

She learned that song from a TV commercial, but used it for the majority of her childhood.

Especially when Roger left, leaving her alone in _that place_ when she was just twelve years old.

Physically as well as emotionally, as she and Rog had never really been close. Even if it was just the two of them in that godforsaken Hellhouse. He had always been an expert at screaming back and she had always been an expert at running away, both from flying fists and scathing words. Hiding behind the couch or under her bed. She became a master at escape.

But she couldn’t run away from everything.

Especially when the only good thing in her life was taken away from her.

_Hadley got sick._

He had come down with something everyone assumed was a stomach virus, she had been sick with it the week before and had recovered fine. Nobody was worried. They had just assumed he would get better on his own. Boys like Hadley didn't get incurable illnesses. Or _tumors._

It was Pudge, who saw the unhealthy droop in the right side of his mouth, badly slurring his speech, and the odd way his opposing eye seemed to wander and stray out of his control. It looked _bad_ , it was even scarier than the time her mother had overdosed on heroin in their shower and Pudge had been forced to drive them to the hospital, without a license, the year before.

It was called _Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma_ or just DIPG for short. And he was lucky. Most kids with DIPG would get diagnosed between five and seven years old, which made it all the harder, when doctors had to say that there was no treatment. _No survival rate._

Those same doctors looked at Hadley: the specky, sandy-haired boy with a light dusting of freckles over the bridge of his nose, a dimple on his chin, the young girl who held his hand tightly, who stared out the window instead of the tragedy before her and the desperate parents sobbing in the hallway. Hadley who wanted to be a lepidopterist. Who had already planned out their lives together.

Hadley who had an inoperable tumor growing on his brainstem. 

The doctors gave him the optimistic prognosis of six months to a year. 

He only got three months. 

She buried her best-friend.

Then had to grit her teeth and bear it as the world mourned the bright little _girl_ taken too soon.

  
-X-

  
“ _The rumors flew but nobody knew how much she blamed herself_  
_For years and years she tried to hide the whiskey on her breath_  
_She finally drank her pain away a little at a time_  
_But she never could get drunk enough to get him off her mind_  
_Until the night…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
She had wanted to be a chef once and to study in Paris.

Then she made quiche for Hadley’s funeral. 

On his birthdays, she had always made crockpot macaroni and cheese, his favorite spinach and artichoke dip, Black Forest gateau, fresh lemon tarts.

One year she even spent all morning making _Ispahan_ from scratch. They were her favorite things to make by far, and she'd bought real red roses on the way home to garnish them for added effect. They were beautiful, all shades of pink and red, delicate fluffy macaroons sandwiching raspberries and hand-piped rose buttercream with just a touch of lychee in the center. They would share them together, pretending to be fancy Victorian ladies at a dinner party. 

"This my beautiful wife, Pudge,” he would announce proudly to their imaginary guests, tapping on an invisible wine glass to garner their attention. "Graduated top of her class at _La Cuisine Paris!"_

Every week it was a new culinary school for her to go to: _Ballymaloe, Cook and Taste, The School of Artisan Food, L'Academie de Cuisine, Kendall, Johnson and Wales._ He had big dreams for her, even when culinary school seemed so so so far away. 

When she was upset, he was right there with a carton of unbroken eggs, flour and a warm hug, ready to try her latest feel-better creation. He couldn't cook or bake to save his goddamn life, he was remarkably awful at it. But he'd still sit up on the countertop and watch her work. He said it was like she went to a different place, a different world. Browning creole sausage for her jambalaya, dancing around the kitchen with a special look in her big green eyes. Cooking and baking made her so happy, but being with Hadley made her happier. 

"I love you." She'd said, time and time again, hands braced on the countertop and staring up at her boyfriend with all the affection in the world. 

That was all she really needed: a kitchen, some ingredients, Hadley’s fat angry cat named Tiger who had always despised her and Hadley himself. Then she was incurably happy forever more. _Hadley was her home._

When he got sick, she learned how to make easy-to-digest soups and gentle dishes. She read up on foods that were supposed to help boost immune systems and boost the power of his medications. Carrots were supposed to make the chemo work better. Rice and bananas could help with diarrhea. Ginger candy would help ease the nausea. Custard would help with the mouth sores. Orange juice and oranges were supposed to help with the dry mouth. She made numerous mini-meals for him, because it became hard for him to eat larger ones. 

Baking and cooking were the only things she knew how to do right, besides football and track.

But food wasn't going to save her Hadley. No matter how much she researched or tried to make things healthy and macrobiotic.

She would spoon-feed him soup or vegetable mash and watch as it ended up hurled right back into a wastebasket. 

_"I'm so sorry."_

He would whisper, but Pudge would just smash her face into his ever-more prominent collarbones, wanting to be held for the first time in a very long time. 

She didn't realize till later, what he was apologizing for. 

  
-X-

  
_“She put that bottle to her head and pulled the trigger_  
_And finally drank away his memory_  
_Life is short, but this time it was bigger_  
_Than the strength she had to get up off her knees…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
Her parents found the box of love notes that she and Hadley had passed to each other once upon a time. Back when Hadley was a little boy with a busted Fender Stratocaster guitar and a heart full of moths. Back when he could still hold a pen and smile and breathe on his own.

They screamed nothing but abuse at her, it wasn’t surprising. She was used to it. Maybe it would have hurt more if she had loved them.

But the only person who she’d ever loved was now buried six feet under.

_Faggot. Whore. Dyke. Poofter. Slut._

None of those barbs were a surprise. What did surprise her was the bus-ticket to London and the death of a daughter in her parents' eyes. She was to _‘go stay with her brother for a while’._

Fuck that shit, she would never come back, whether Roger wanted her to stay or not.

She was _done._

  
-X-

 

“ _We found her with her face down in the pillow_  
_Clinging to his picture for dear life_  
_We laid her next to him beneath the willow…”_

  
-X-

  
The employees at the bus station took the liberty of wheeling her out of the building. _(Scary unaccompanied amputee, an insurance issue just waiting to happen)._

She didn't often use a wheelchair anymore, not when she had her prosthetics. But she was too tired to argue. Her white-splotched dark hair, shoulder-length on one side and shaved on the other, was falling in her green eyes and she blew a few errant pieces away halfheartedly. Not really caring all that much.

They rolled her right to a bored young man in an unbuttoned jean vest that was untucked in the back like a ducktail and a pair of red leather pants that had _never_ been in style. He had more eyeliner on than any nearby woman and a cigarette hanging out the corner of his mouth.

His eyes caught first on the spokes of the wheelchair made for someone much larger than she, then on the hard plastic prosthetics, covered in red, white and blue splashes that tended to attract the eye and finally on her face.

He looked away, and she wasn't surprised. 

_She wondered when they became strangers._

_Wondered if they always had been._

She looked down at her red guitar case instead, covered in the band stickers spanning most of the ten years that she taught herself and played with Hadley, and inside of it, her scratched and dinged early Telecaster was hidden underneath an old Charlie Daniels t-shirt. Her worn out baseball glove was sticking out of the corner of her old team backpack and her shiny lime-green forearm crutches sat clutched between her thighs. They were starting to wear yet another hole in her Levi’s. Once again, she rarely used them, but they were there, just in case. _(Hadley’s Stratocaster was with her as well, though she couldn’t bring herself to open it, ever, it hurt too much)._

“Did you have a good trip, Clare?” Her brother asked softly as he helped her stand with one calloused hand and led her towards the curb, where several empty minicabs waited.

She’d never been to London before. Never even left Truro. 

Her lips ached to snap, _my name is Pudge._ To have some fraction of autonomy, control over her life once more. Instead she just forced a smile through her vaguely cherry-glossed lips and her eyes turned downcast. 

“Yes. Thank you, Roger." 

He paused, as if expecting something more from her than just small polite responses and a vacant look. But that was all he was going to get.

She had nothing left to give him. Or the world that didn't want her. 

Once they reached the cab, he attempted to help her, but there was no need. She simply slid into the backseat, both her crutches shifted into one hand so that she could grab onto her belongings with the other. Not even sparing him a glance.

 

_“What's that?"_

_Pudge, ten years old and walking funny with new bulky prosthetics playing peekaboo under her skirt, had climbed up into Roger's lap. Pretending like it was a struggle, even though she'd barely grown an inch since the last time they'd done so. Peering at her nearly sixteen-year-old big brother's book, with its cherry red cover and glossy gold print. Stolen from the shop down the street. Rog fingered one of the edges lightly before pulling it open so that Pudge could see all the shiny print inside, as well as the lovely handmade art pieces._

_"It's Hamlet, a play by Shakespeare."_

_She blinked those big eyes up at her brother, chewing on her bottom lip. "What's it about?"_

_"A prince who has to avenge his father's death by killing his uncle, the man who murdered his father and became king... But then almost everybody dies at the end, because everything goes wrong."_

_Pudge's eyes had widened like sauce dishes as she peered into the book, as if trying to divine its secrets._

_"Why would anybody want to kill their brother!?" She was aghast at the thought._

_Roger could only shrug. "I don't know, nobody does. But Claudius says that he did it to be king, to have power and to have Hamlet's mother as his queen. He loved her. Maybe... Maybe he'd thought he was doing what was right. We only meet King Hamlet as a ghost after all, so... What if Claudius wasn't all that bad?"_

_"And Hamlet?"_

_Pudge hummed sleepily as Roger’s hand started running through her messy hair._

_"Hamlet was so blinded by trying to do what was right that he damned them all at the end. He was so lost in his duty and deference to a father who expected the world of him. So it all went horribly wrong. That's why it's called a tragedy."_

_Pudge fell asleep in her brother's lap that night, dozing off after Rog had started to read her the old English text and Roger had happily carried her up the stairs to bed, knowing full well that their mother was passed out in the bathtub with a dirty needle in her arm, but as he lay the little girl down in her bed, he heard a small voice whisper._

_"I love you, Rog.”_

_Yet with an angry drunk father coming home soon, a gig and pub crawl that night, Roger had just smiled obligingly and left the room. Not realizing that she wasn't quite asleep yet, that the little girl had been waiting instead, listening for Roger to say it back._

_That was the first time he never did._

_It wasn't the last._

  
The attention-grabbing flamboyant man who flounced into Roger’s shared flat, was accompanied by a concerned looking human tree and a kid who looked like he wouldn’t be amiss as a student in her secondary school. They were bickering about something or another and the fellow looked surprised to see her. “Oh, Rog! You didn’t say we were having company! Who’s this bloke then?” The bright gregarious man bounced over and peered at her closely from where she sat on the couch in her ratty grey sweatshirt and old jeans, Roger’s purple corduroy pageboy hat pulled low over her dull green eyes.

Roger pointedly coughed behind his hand. “This is my little _sister_ Clare, she’ll be staying with us the next few days.”

The man with soft waves of dark hair brushing his jawline and those big expressive espresso-colored eyes peered close, leaning directly into her personal space.

“ _Sister?_ Oh, darling! You look absolutely _dreadful!”_ Turning to glare at Roger. “Roger Taylor, how could you allow this to go on?” _Really? He was asking colorblind Roger Taylor about style?_

The bloody fashion police.

She rolled her eyes, the words coming unprompted. “Thank you for the compliment. Although I’m not sure why my outfit is any of your concern, _Bucky_.” Side-eyeing those impressive teeth of his. The man instantly recoiled at the name though, _shit,_ it was obvious that she’d accidentally trod on a nerve.

“At least I’m not already going _grey,_ love.” Nodding pointedly at her splash of white, always so fucking visible.

“Ooo! How _creative!”_ Fists clenched, a reflection of her older brother playing under the surface, a flicker that the other man seemed to see and shrink from.

Roger sat down beside her on the couch with a hefty sigh. “Clare, just _let it go.”_ But she wheeled on him next, eyes alight with muted rage.

“My name is _Pudge_. The only people who seriously call me _Clare_ , are Mum and Dad.” _You know that, you gave me the nickname, asshole._ She gazed down at him critically. “And since I don’t see any track-marks on the insides of your elbows, you can’t be our _druggie Mummy.”_ One large sniff into his vest. “And while you do _smell_ like a distillery, you aren’t our Dad… So don’t aspire to be an abusive prick, Rog. It doesn’t suit you.”

It was her turn to look away.

“Now, I’m not sure what you were told about my spontaneous _‘visit’,_ ” Air-quotes included, her voice low and painful. “But it’s in the vain hope that you’ll beat my faggy ass till the gay disappears.”

She bit down her bottom lip so hard that she could taste blood in her mouth.

“Which is funny, because my boyfriend wasn't a girl. It doesn't matter if he had tits, because he was still a boy _inside,_ where it mattered the most.” Resolute in her love for Hadley, even if he was gone.

“Now..." She growled, trying to reflect the attitudes of the people around her, just like the chameleon she was. The mirror. The painted doll with nothing inside, only a cavity. "Where’s your bloody shower?”

Skinny arms crossed with those incendiary eyes flashing.

  
-X-

  
“ _While the angels sang a whiskey lullaby…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
When Pudge was six years old, she'd wanted to be an _escapologist._ Just like Harry Houdini. 

She'd practiced by locking herself up in the damnedest places and somehow managing to set herself free, most of it to get away from her father and her mother's drug dealers who came by the house sometimes. Trunks, cardboard boxes, toy handcuffs, wardrobes. She'd even wanted to join the circus one day. Anything to get out. 

As a young girl, those skills had been what saved her, barricading herself to save herself.

  
Most _Great Escapes_ are born of desperation, and hers was no exception. 

 


End file.
